Walter D.M. Bell has become a legend among
elephant hunters due to his great success in the ivory trade during the golden
age of hunting in East Africa. He is known as “Karamojo” Bell due to his numerous
safaris through this remote wilderness area in North Eastern Uganda. He is
famous for perfecting the brain shot on elephants, dissecting their skulls and
making a careful study of the anatomy of the skull, so he could predict paths
of bullet travel from a shot at any angle in order to reach the brain. Using
mostly 6.5mm and 7mm caliber rifles, he was an advocate of shot placement over
big bore power for killing efficiently.

Modern writers on the internet and in
magazine articles have tended to refer to him and his tally of elephants in
this vein, “He shot all of his several hundred elephants with a 7x57mm rifle”
or words to that effect. In fact, Walter Bell killed 1,011 elephants in the
course of his career. Since most people refer to him for his small caliber
prowess and his elephant tally I thought I would try and break it down, because
there are a great number of people quoting what “Karamojo Bell” did or didn’t
do and I have noted a common tendency in the last few years to play down what
he did with small caliber rifles. Perhaps this is in direct relation to the
resurgence in popularity of magnums and the larger safari rifles. Craig
Boddington is quite apt to mention the "few hundred elephants" that
Bell took. (Mr. Boddington, I believe, is an erstwhile heavy rifle enthusiast.)

Bell recorded all of his kills and shots
fired. It was a business to him, not pleasure, and he needed to record expenditures.

He shot exactly 1,011 elephants; about 800 of
them were shot with Rigby-made 7x57mm (.275 Rigby) rifles and round nose
173 grain military ammo.

He shot elephants with a Mannlicher-Schoenauer
6.5x54mm carbine using the long 159 grain FMJ bullets and noted that it
was probably the most beautiful rifle he ever had, but gave it up due to
faulty ammunition.

He shot his first safari with a Lee Enfield in
.303 British and the 215 grain army bullet. Thereafter he kept a ten shot
Army& Navy Lee Enfield as a sort of back up and in the hope he might
find ten elephants silly enough to stand around long enough for him to use
the whole magazine.

He went to rifles chambered in .318 Westley
Richards for a while, which is a .32 caliber cartridge firing a 250 grain
bullet at about 2400 fps, but found the ammunition unreliable and again
returned to the 7x57mm. He later wrote that the .318 Westley Richards was
more of a reliable killer for certain shots, while the 7x57 was a "surgeons"
rifle.

He also recorded that one of the reasons why
he favored the 7x57 was that the ammunition was more reliable and he could
not recall ever having a fault with it; whereas British sporting
ammunition, apart from the .303 military ammo, gave him endless trouble
with splitting cases.

He owned a .450/400 Jeffrey double rifle made
by Thomas Bland & Sons, but did not use it after his first safari, as
he considered the action not rugged enough and the Mauser repeating action
to be just as quick as a double for aimed shooting.

He wrote about being able to drop an elephant
with a light caliber rifle if he shot it in the same place that he would have
shot it with a heavy rifle and realised this fully when he saw that elephants
shot with a .303 died just as quickly when shot in the same place as a
.450/400 double rifle with both triggers wired together, so they went off
at the same time.

To judge ammunition expenditure and his own
shooting, he calculated an average. He discovered that with the .275 (7x57mm)
he fired an average of 1.5 shots per kill. This means that half the time he
only needed one shot. That is a fair performance for such a large number of
elephants killed with a rifle and cartridge that was intended for deer hunting.

It is also interesting to note that, although
Bell is the most famous proponent of using small caliber "nitro"
rifles for large game, he did not discover the technique, nor was he its
earliest advocate. Well known hunter Arthur Neumann, for example, had been
shooting elephants with a .303 Lee Metford rifle for years before Walter Bell
got into the business.

WDM Bell is forever associated with the John
Rigby & Sons Mauser rifle and the .275 Rigby cartridge. ".275
Rigby" was the British designation for the German 7x57mm Mauser cartridge.
This cartridge propelled a .284 caliber, 173 grain bullet at around 2300 fps
and the bullets he used for elephant brain shots were full metal jacketed
solids. He declared once that a soft point bullet had never sullied the bore of
his rifle. It is interesting to compare these ballistics with what is commonly
regarded as essential performance today.

The Rigby Mauser was just that, a Mauser 98 action
rifle in sporting configuration, half stocked and finely finished. The actions
were made by the Mauser Company in Germany and Rigby had the rights to sell
them in England. The Mauser action was the darling of the sporting world at the
time and Bell was obviously a man who appreciated fine rifles; he bought the
best. For most of his life, he was an advocate of the bead front blade and
express rear sights. However, in later years he used an aperture sight, as well
as early telescopic sights. His take-down .275 Rigby rifle was sold by his
widow (after his death in 1954) to the writer Robert Ruark, who later presented
it to Mark Selby, son of the famous white hunter Harry Selby. A constellation
of famous African names converged around the ownership of this rifle.
Interestingly, it is a half stock, take down rifle with a trap made out of the
grip cap to store cleaning gear. The floorplate is engraved WDMB. Harry Selby
later had a scope fitted to it.

Shot placement for the tricky brain shot on
elephants required good marksmanship. Bell constantly practiced by dry-firing
his rifle. He always carried his own rifle, eschewing gun bearers (another plus
for the lightweight Mauser) and picked pretend targets of opportunity as he
traveled, dry firing at a distant rock or bird. He believed that this was the
single practice most beneficial to a hunter.

He was a great proponent of the bead
foresight and it was his drawings with which he illustrated his first book Wanderings
of an Elephant Hunter that explained to me how to use a bead front sight
properly. You should hold the bead low in the notch so that your elevation is
constant and open both eyes so that you can see through your hand and rifle
with your non-shooting eye. Bell sighted his rifles with the point of impact in
the centre of the bead. When used like this, with both eyes open, it is much
like a red dot sight and I shoot my open sighted rifles this way quite
successfully.

As a further example of marksmanship (if
brain shooting a great many elephants isn’t enough), Bell once used up the
remainder of his unwanted .318 ammunition by shooting flying cormorants out of
the air. Spectators believed that he was using a shotgun and were amazed to
find that he was actually using a rifle. He was also observed shooting fish
that were jumping from the surface of a lake.

I will make the point that unlike many
African writers (Peter Capstick jumps to mind), Karamojo Bell doesn’t seem to
have been particularly threatened by an elephant, rogue or otherwise. Nor did
he have to turn a charge or anything like that. The prose in his books has none
of the trumpeting about the manly virtues of facing grisly death upon which
Capstick built his writing career and that has been popular ever since
Hemingway went on a couple of hunting trips. (Hemingway was disappointed when
he shot a lion and it simply died.)

In his opinion, a great many of the charges
that one heard about were actually panicked animals who didn’t know in which
direction danger lay and were fleeing towards the hunter. In his letters he wrote
that he had probably shot between 600 and 700 buffalo in his time and had never
been charged even once. However, he stated that he made it his business to
never have to deal with a wounded buffalo.

A great many people have tried to explain
away Bell’s elephant hunting success by asserting that he didn’t need to hunt
in thick cover and could shoot elephants from long range, the implication being
that somehow the behaviour of African elephants must have been different back
then. This is untrue, as any reader of his books will find. Bell hunted hard,
walked thousands of miles, ran down elephants and was a very cool marksman at
extremely close range. He sighted his rifles in right on the nose at 80 yards
and preferred to get within 30 to 40 yards of his elephants. He would drop the
first one, then climb on top of it so as not to be trampled by the other
members of the herd and so he could get clear shots.

One does not walk down an elephant in
uncharted African wilderness with a tool one regards as marginal and Bell had
complete confidence in his ability to harvest elephants with the Rigby Mauser.
It was his business and also his hide at stake, especially considering that the
amount of money to be made was considerable. To put his efforts into perspective,
he wrote of one day when he tracked and shot nine elephants. He estimated that
he had earned 877 pounds sterling from the ivory harvested from those nine
kills. After one expedition he returned with ivory worth over 23,000 pounds
sterling. That was a vast sum of money and converted to today’s currency
equivalent it would make your eyes water. One does not risk that kind of money
and effort on a questionable calibre.

Walter Bell left Scotland a young adventurer
obsessed with hunting. He first travelled to East Africa and took a short lived
job as a lion hunter at the age of sixteen, on the same stretch of railway that
later became notorious for the Lions of Tsavo, the extraordinary man-eaters
that plagued the railway workers. He travelled to the Yukon Territory to cash
in on the gold rush and make his fortune. It did not pan out and he became a
market hunter, shooting game for the Dawson markets with a Winchester single
shot falling block rifle, until he was robbed by his partner. He joined the Canadian
forces sent to fight alongside the British in the Boer War in South Africa at
the turn of the 20th Century. Taken prisoner at one point by the Boers, he
managed to escape. When the war was settled, he stayed on and bought his way
into elephant hunting, outfitting his first safari on foot into East Africa.

Bell made himself into a successful elephant
hunter not just because of his skill with a rifle, but also due to carefully
maintained good relations with the local people in the territories through
which he travelled. At that time vast areas of Africa had not yet been
penetrated by settlers or traders. For many of the native encountered, he was
the first white man they had seen. He was always ready with gifts for chiefs
and kings. He bought permission to hunt from them. One of his best ideas was to
post a reward of a heifer for any African who gave him information about the
whereabouts of elephants that led to five bulls being shot. He soon had a flood
of elephant sightings coming in and he was as good as his word, readily paying
for the information. For recaltrant natives, a shooting display with his Mauser
Broomhandle semi-auto pistol, during which he would often shoot stones thrown
by his men out of the air (easy enough, he wrote, with some practice) was
enough to quell any ideas of attacking his camp.

Shooting buck animals for meat and hides was
a large part of his regular duties as an ivory hunter. His porters, camp guards
and personal men and their family could number as many as 200 people, for whom he
had to provide meat. He also would shoot for meat and hides that were used as
trade goods with the villagers in the areas he passed through. He used another
rifle for this purpose, a long barrelled Mannlicher in 6.5x54mm made by Gibbs,
for which he had a supply of soft nosed bullets. He wrote that this rifle was
very accurate and probably had the largest job of all. With meat shooting and
supplying hundreds of hides for sandals, donkey saddles and trade goods, this
rifle was probably the busiest of all and with it he shot everything from
antelope to giraffe.

When the Great War (World War I) broke out,
he immediately headed back to England and joined the fledgling Royal Flying
Corps, becoming a pilot and flying in Tanganyika (Tanzania). He was known for flying
without an observer, because the observer obstructed his view when he tried to
shoot down enemy planes with his rifle. In the Balkans he once shot down a
German Albatross fighter with a single round. His machine gun jammed after that
first shot, but the one shot was enough. He later served in Greece and Italy,
achieved the rank of Captain and was twice decorated with the Military Cross.

After the War, Bell returned to ivory
hunting, traveling by canoe into then uncharted African wilds after legendary
herds of large elephants. He made his last expedition in the early 1920’s.

He retired to Scotland a wealthy man and
after marrying an aristocratic wife he bought an estate in Scotland called
“Corriemollie.” There is no unhappy or overly dramatic ending to his story. He
lived unscathed through all of his adventures to enjoy the wealth he had
accumulated with his rifle.

Walter Bell spent his later years writing
magazine article and books on his exploits in Africa. He created water color
paintings and ink drawings of red stags in the Highland tussock, as well as
paintings of splendidly depicted elephants on the savannah, made with an eye
for anatomical detail and an appreciation of the body language of the African
elephant. He used them to illustrate his books. With his wife he had a racing
yacht built he called Trenchmer and
successfully sailed it competitively. During World War Two, he was active in
the home guard. This was now his third war.

He continued to keep abreast of shooting
developments and hunted red deer in the Scottish hills with a Rigby Mauser in
.22 Savage High Power (5.6x52R). In the 1930’s, he purchased a Winchester Model
70 in the then new .220 Swift caliber with a telescopic sight. He swore by this
as the perfect round for red deer, due to its lightning kills with a neck shot.

He made it clear in a magazine article
published in American Rifleman in
1954 what he would use if he returned to Africa. With his vast experience ivory
hunting, he felt he could put his finger on the perfect caliber for the
purpose, which he felt was the .318 Westley Richards, or the 8x57mm Mauser.
However, if he had to do it all over again with a modern rifle he would choose
a Winchester Model 70 in .308 Winchester loaded with homogenous bullets and
sighted with a ghost ring rear aperture sight.

Like everyone, WDM Bell was a product of his
times and to hunt the dangerous big game of Africa with such light caliber rifles
would be illegal today. The legacy that WDM Bell leaves us is that perfect shot
placement, coupled with proper bullet construction, trumps caliber every time. The
best thing you can do to increase your hunting success is to understand the
anatomy of your quarry and practice with your rifle until you can put your
first shot exactly where it should go.